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cofounder Bill Gates has given away more than $28 billion, comfortably making him the world’s greatest living philanthropist.

By the time he has donated the rest, he may well have the elimination of polio and drastic reduction of child malaria on his epitaph.

Yet, providing access to financial services to the one-third of the world’s people who are currently unbanked might just be on there, too.

Banks are hardly the most popular institutions in Western developed countries right now among both individuals and small businesses. Insurers don’t rank much higher.

However, the 2.5 billion people who do not have access to bank accounts, loans and insurance might think differently – especially if the access that they do gain is much more benign than the way that banks and insurers in the West have traditionally treated their customers.

That is probably not how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would describe it, but it is nonetheless ploughing $65 million into the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), an organization it helped set up to tackle the problem.

Alfred Hannig, AFI’s executive director, says: “This started as an idea in 2006 when I was working in Indonesia in a financial development co-operation organization and got an email and then a call from the Gates Foundation.

“They asked me a very simple question that I had never heard before. If there was no funding constraint, what would I do to leverage what I knew about financial inclusion from the national level to a global level?”

Hannig came up with proposals to model provision of financial services for the unbanked in developing countries on best practice in other emerging economies.

“What was missing was a mechanism to share this knowledge so others could follow suit and replicate what was working,” he says.

The model was approved in 2008 and AFI was launched in September 2009, structured as a project of Germany’s GIZ ministry for development.

From the outset, AFI was given the status of implementation partner for financial inclusion of the G20 group of developing and emerging countries.

The Gates Foundation provided an initial five-year grant of $40 million, partly matched by $9 million from the German government.

“The Gates Foundation explained to me that for them this was a bet,” Hannig recalls.

“If the bet didn’t work out at least they would have learned a lot and perhaps they wouldn’t do it again but they were hoping the bet would be successful. They were ready to take a risk and this is important because for the Gates Foundation in 2007-2008 was not at all familiar with policy projects. It was involved with health projects like malaria by vaccinations and HIV/Aids treatments that could produce tangible results. The policy area is much more complicated but AFI took off in a way that we never thought it would. And while the funding we receive sounds like a lot, we are providing real value for money.”

Compared to the amounts that the Gates Foundation is devoting to fighting Aids, malaria and polio, of course, the funding sounds like very little, while the foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) team employs only 25 of the foundation’s 1,211 staff